A Pack Of Rebels

A Charleston artist and mapmaker put together a deck of playing cards honoring the heroes of the Confederacy.

As he shuffled through life, Charleston artist William Aiken Walker must have been inspired by card games, for he not only painted Poker Game Aboard a Mississippi Riverboat (1880), but during the Civil War he even made his own deck of cards. A Confederate map maker at the time, Walker painted miniature of four Southern heroes as kings in his patriotic pack. Three aces depict war scenes: diamonds, the firing on Fort Sumter; clubs, a Merrimac victory; hearts, the Merrimac versus the Monitor. Queens and jacks are anonymous contributors to the war effort. Walker’s quaint work is in the collection of Jay P. Altmayer of Mobile, Alabama.

Why do we need a national
nonprofit membership society for American history?

“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.

65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.

The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.

Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.

40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.

A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.

“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.

The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.

Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.

The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.